


these violent delights

by strangehunger



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate POV, Coda, F/F, Foreshadowing, Harrow POV, Introspection, Mild descriptions of violence, Oblivious! Gideon, Protective! Harrow, Scene Rewrite, character introspection, slash if you squint?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-26 14:16:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21375478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangehunger/pseuds/strangehunger
Summary: In Drearbrurh, the sight of a sword to Gideon’s head or a hand around her throat might have been cause for celebration. Hell, had Harrow both the opportunity and spine for it, she might have driven the sword through Gideon’s skull herself, an effective solution to the countless problems wrapped up in Gideon’s sloppy robes and sloppier face paint. Instead, Harrow pressed her outstretched hand into that vulnerable place at the base of Gideon’s skull, digging her fingers in tight to prevent them from lashing out.Her own voice came unexpectedly, rising from some unknown depth. Harrow said, “Your cavalier drew on my cavalier.”A Gideon the Ninth Chapter 7 rewrite, written from Harrow’s POV, because I am obsessed with this scene.
Relationships: Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 14
Kudos: 285





	these violent delights

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I have been meaning to publish this and kept putting it off. 
> 
> One of my favorite scenes in the entire book is in chapter seven, when Protesilaus draws his sword on Gideon and we get a first glimpse of Harrow being protective. It’s the first time Harrow is really confronted with Gideon being in danger, and I would have loved to see the scene examined from Harrow’s point of view — and so, I did it myself! 
> 
> Not really slash-y beyond the same kind of undercurrent of tension we get in the book, but whatever. I hope you enjoy! I’m on tumblr at [strangehunger](%E2%80%9Cstrangehunger.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D) if you ever wanna talk, cry, etc.

The first house was blinding. 

That was the only way Harrowhark could describe it. Even through the dark netting of her veils, the brilliance of the planet was overwhelming. Ahead, light bounced off of a fortress of pale white stone threaded with gold marbling, the decaying plant matter that dripped from windows and balconies the only reprieve for her weary eyes. To her back, the ocean, a violent mirror of Dominicus and the empty sky above, blue and white. 

Harrow had never seen the ocean before, and she didn’t care to look at it now. Each inhalation brought a breath full of briny air, the taste of salt heavy on her tongue. If she closed her eyes, she could remember a cold, deep baptismal bath, her mother’s hands on her arms and her low voice spilling secrets in Harrow’s ear.

If she tried even harder, she could remember another pool, even further in Drearburh, locked behind a door that was never meant to be opened. A pool thick with salt and swaying with an impossible tide, and at its center…

_ “Rest assured that wherever I go, my heart is interred here.” _

No. Harrow did not care to look at the ocean now. 

Instead, she turned her attention to Teacher, to the descending shuttles, to anything other than the sweeping ocean to her back or the heinous… _ cavalier _at her side. Despite the veils, she had to squint as she watched the remaining two shuttles descend from orbit. The sunlight, bleaching everything around her, stung at her eyes. To Harrow, raised in the pitchy depths of Drearburh, it was disturbing how open and bright a place could be. 

Open, bright, and _ dead. _Thanergy rose from the earth like steam rising from a mangled corpse. It was all Harrow could do not to collapse from the terrible, terrific weight of it. 

Instead, she focused on the three figures stumbling out of the first shuttle, each one of them more vexing than the last. What she did _ not _focus on was Gideon. 

Gideon Nav. 

Her cavalier. 

Gideon Nav, Griddle, both the bane and nucleus of Harrowhark’s existence. Her childhood prey, her lifelong torment. Stubborn, obnoxious, _ disgraceful_. If she could have done this alone, she might have tossed Gideon out of the shuttle and into open orbit. The longer she looked at Gideon, with her stupid sunglasses (sunglasses she had slipped on after a _ wink _ of her stupid, stunning, burnt amber eyes) the more tempted she was to throw her from the dock, destroying years of household tradition and her shot at Lyctordom. Instead, she eyed the newcomers with a sense of detached trepidation, forgetting that Gideon did not fare well when not on a _ leash. _

Harrowhark was almost surprised at how quick her newly annointed cavalier could be. One moment, she was at Harrow’s side, the next she was taking off across the dock, running awfully fast for a girl who wouldn’t run even if her life depended on it. As if drawn by an invisible string, Gideon was darting toward the closer of the two shuttles, that of the Seventh House. 

Harrow drew her gaze away from the twins — one radiant, one ghostly — to watch, lips pressed in a line so tight that her jaw nearly ached, as her cavalier scooped what looked to be an armful of gaudy, gauzy linens from Teacher’s arms. Harrow didn’t know what the Hell Gideon was doing, but still, she didn’t _ like _it. Her fingers twitched within her dark glove in want of a knucklebone with which to make good on her earlier threat to delight in violence. 

As she watched Gideon curl over the Seventh House adept, a familiar tide of irritation rose within Harrowhark — a tide held at bay only by the point of a sword, pressed suddenly to the base of Gideon’s skull. 

Harrow did not run. Not for herself, and certainly not for _ Gideon Nav_. All the same, she found herself drawn swiftly to her cavalier’s side, one hand instinctively going to fiddle with the bone embedded in the lobe of her ear. 

The man wielding the sword was grotesquely muscular, even compared to Gideon and the biceps she was so ridiculously proud of. He towered over her crouched form, ashy skin swathing his bulging muscles, his sword glinting bright under the beating rays of Dominicus. 

His sword, which was pointed at Gideon. 

An eternity seemed to pass before his adept’s eyes fluttered open. Even from this distance, the Seventh House adept looked like a doll. Eyes the color of sky above and the sea below, framed by branching veins of purple. A soft fall of chestnut hair, pale skin pulled taut over spindly bones. A strange sense of satisfaction washed through Harrow as the necromancer coughed a clot of blood onto her dress, a monstrosity of pale green frills that looked comical against the austere black of Gideon’s robe. 

“Protesilaus, stand down.” 

Protesilaus did not stand down. If anything, the blade of his rapier seemed to bite further into the dark swaddle of Gideon’s hood. Something deep within Harrow closed like a fist. 

“Stand down, you goof. You’re going to get us in trouble.” 

_ Too late_, said a voice in the back of Harrow’s head, but the sword receded nevertheless. The monstrous Cavlier’s movements were sudden and jerky, the sword arm dropping as if his strings had been cut. Harrow’s hand fell from where it fumbled with the bone in her ear and, quite suddenly, found itself at the base of Gideon Nav’s neck. 

How neatly it fit in her hand. Harrow’s fingers dug into the back of Gideon’s neck, pressing insistently through the thick cloth of her hood. Beneath — a swath of fragile skin, the roaring of blood through vein, the thick rope of muscle, all easily parted by the flick of a sword. Gideon grew still, shoulders more taught beneath Harrow’s hand than beneath the seventh cavalier’s blade, and Harrow’s grip tightened. 

In Drearbrurh, the sight of a sword to Gideon’s head or a hand around her throat might have been cause for celebration. Hell, had Harrow both the opportunity and spine for it, she might have driven the sword through Gideon’s skull herself, an effective solution to the countless problems wrapped up in Gideon’s sloppy robes and sloppier face paint. Instead, Harrow pressed her outstretched hand into that vulnerable place at the base of Gideon’s skull, digging her fingers in tight to prevent them from lashing out. 

Her own voice came unexpectedly, rising from some unknown depth. Harrow said, “Your cavalier drew on my cavalier.” 

The seventh adept was annoying. Possibly even more so than Gideon Nav, who had yet to dump the bundle of bones on the dock and walk away. The simpering idiot of a necromancer brought her pale hands to her face, and Harrow rolled her eyes beneath the layers of fabric protecting them from the sun. _ Tears. _If the Seventh House necromancer wanted to cry, Harrow would give her something to weep about. 

Harrow was even more so inclined to do so when the necromancer burst into peals of pretty laughter, apparently _ amused _at the prospect of her cavalier’s sword at the back of Gideon’s neck. She flailed her limp hand in front of her face. Harrow’s fingers twitched; had she the strength, she would have dragged Gideon away by the scruff of her neck. 

After Teacher was done wiping the blood from the girl’s mouth like a parent coddling an infant, the girl turned her uncannily blue eyes on Harrow, murmuring, “I can’t believe I get to look real tomb maidens in the face.” 

If Harrow had her way, she would never do so again. 

After what seemed like an eternity of gabbing with Teacher, the girl’s _ ridiculous _cavalier, little more than an assortment of muscle bundled under sickly grey flesh, scooped her out of Gideon’s arms like a child with a plaything. Each move was short and abrupt, electric jolts of in the muscle of a dying corpse. A chill rushed down Harrow’s spine when his empty gaze caught hers, oddly familiar in its lack of depth. He mechanically propped his adept up to look out at the dock around them. Still, the girl’s eyes remained focused on Gideon. 

Begrudgingly, Harrow eased her grip. Gideon rose at her side, and Harrow’s fingers fell to a fist at her side, quite suddenly empty of a reason not to wring the final breaths of life from the ailing necromancer in front of her. “What must I do to gain forgiveness?” Cooed the necromancer. Her question was aimed at Harrow, but her sparkling gaze was trained on Gideon. “If my house blasphemes against the House of the Ninth in the first five minutes, I’m going to feel like a boor.” 

_ Die slowly, _was Harrow’s first inclination. Instead she said, “Keep your sword off my cavalier.” 

Harrow did not like Lady Dulcinea Septimus, duchess of castle Rhodes, or her dead-eyed cavalier, Protesilaus the Seventh. She particularly did not like the way Septimus’ gaze dropped to Gideon’s face as she thanked her for her assistance, uncaring that it had nearly ended with Harrow’s cavalier impaled on her own cavalier’s sword before the trials could even begin. 

“The Ninth House wishes health to the Lady Septimus,” said Harrow, who wished the Lady Septimus anything but, “and prudence to Protesilaus the Seventh.”

Harrow turned from the uncanny pair as quickly as she could, moving toward the marble fortress in swift, exacting steps measured to get Gideon away from the two as quickly as possible. Harrow did not trust them — the cavalier with those empty eyes, so reminiscent of Harrowhark’s father’s that suspicion was already buzzing in the back of her skull, nor his necromancer, whose strange blue eyes Harrow wanted to rip out more and more with every second they lingered on Gideon. 

At her side, Teacher rattled off something about the ailing Lady Septimus. Harrow’s gaze dropped to her own gloved hand. Something darker and more insistent than the humiliation of seeing her cavalier cradling some stranger had risen up in Harrow at the sight of Protesilaus’ sword at Gideon’s neck. She flexed her fingers, and remembered the warmth of that neck, the heat of Gideon’s body seeping even through the thick, synthetic fabric of her cloak. Suddenly, violently, she imagined that sword driving clean through, exiting Gideon’s bare, vulnerable throat in a river of blood. 

Harrow’s hand curled closed on the memory of that warmth. She looked out at The First House and, for the first time, thought, _ I should not have brought Gideon here. _

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! Please feel free to reach out to me on here or on tumblr to cry about Gideon the Ninth.


End file.
